


This is Not My Name

by elrhiarhodan



Category: White Collar
Genre: Backstory, Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen, Season/Series 04 Spoilers, the shoah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-12-03 03:42:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/pseuds/elrhiarhodan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was born Rachel Caffrey, then they told her that her name was Mary Alice Brooks.  She wanted to be Naomi Zimmerman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is Not My Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigerbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerbright/gifts).



Mary Alice Brooks didn’t exist outside of a few pieces of paper and a computer entry. Rachel Caffrey Bennett didn’t exist either, not anymore.

The woman they called Mary Alice hated that name. It sounded like it belonged to some WASP princess who should be doing housework in cheap pearls and a shirtwaist dress, like Donna Reed. At least “Rachel Caffrey” had some personality – some _va-va-voom_ – as her grandmother might have said.

She wished that the Marshals had at least let her pick her name. She’d have chosen “Naomi Zimmerman” instead. That was a good name, a strong name, the name of a Survivor. And instead of “Danny,” her boy could have been called David, for a king and for a Survivor, too.

She wasn’t strong, not like her grandparents, who survived the unthinkable. Her grandmother survived Sachsenhausen and the forced labor: twenty hours a day making bricks and airplane parts and counterfeit English currency. She survived the murder of her mother, her father, her sisters and brothers. She survived things that she never would talk about. Her grandfather survived the Lodz ghetto and then the deportation to the camps. He lasted long enough to cling to the barbed wire when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz.

She wasn’t strong like that. Strong enough to survive such horror and to find love and remember the traditions. 

Nor was she like her mother, who was strong enough to defy her family and her heritage to marry for love and make her parents honor and respect her choice. 

No, she wasn’t strong at all. One day, her world collapsed and she just wanted to disappear.

Her grandparents were gone from her, her mother and father too. She never got the chance to say goodbye before the Marshals came and whisked them away into this dreary new life. She wrote to her bubbeh and her zaide, she gave the men who watched out for them her letters, but she never got a reply. Maybe they forgot about her, maybe she didn’t matter anymore. It felt that way, all alone in a strange city.

She tried to fit into the life that these strangers made for her, but she couldn’t. The small house in suburban St. Louis was in a good school district for her son, when he was old enough. She didn’t have to work, since James was “dead,” she got his pension – although that confused her. He was alive enough to confess to murdering his supervising officer, right?

Neal – no, Danny, now – he was her joy and her bane. Even at four years old, he was so smart, so clever and resourceful. She wished she could be a better mother, she wished she could do for him like her mother did for her. Getting up every morning, making sure he had a good breakfast, that he had time to play and learn, he ate a good dinner and was tucked safely into bed every night. But she’d look at her son, see James in his bright blue eyes, and she had to turn away.

Maybe if he was called David and she was Naomi, things would be different. She’d light the candles on Friday nights and say the prayers her grandmother taught her. She’d walk with him to synagogue and burst with pride when he was bar mitzvah’d. 

But he was called Danny, not David and she was Mary Alice, not Naomi. And the life she wanted was not the life she had.

__

  


FIN


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